Daybreak at the straits.

Daybreak at the straits

   1

   The clouds that lie in cinnabar striations
   are juggled by a nimble waterspout
   too distant for significance. The dim
   pink of daybreak binds the sky with dark
   barely distinguishable from a darker sea.
   The horizon mortices itself with chinks of rose.
   What we call day is nothing more
   than disintegrated darkness at the Straits.
   Night bickers for asylum still
   in unlaced shoes, implores the paling windowpanes
   to be steadfast for dark against the light.
   I am witness to the spectral provocations
   daylight introduces to a vista
   that all night stood
   islanded by nothing but the stars.

   2

   Tired of the meditations on futility
   that now retard my nights I walked to see
   the waters of the Straits in darkness hesitate,
   recoil and hover, tremble just before they calibrate
   shocked sandstone, the staved cliff, the pitiable
   barricades we raise against the terrible
   erosions waves exact. The wind's a whittler here,
   pares quartz to thinnest splinters, loves the sheer
   spare sea-lathed skeletons of objects cast ashore.

   It comforts me at night, a watchman of the stars
   that only change by reasonable laws, to parse
   the luminous degradations of the dark
   as lethal light insinuates and tinges. Dogs bark
   down at Rice Point, a rooster clears its throat outside.
   From the cliff a cormorant topples like a suicide.

   3

   In the watches of the night, as the Psalmist said,
   I meditate on darkness, I remember my dead.
   The dark is palpable, has a silken-sash-drawn feel,
   gloves the troubled fingertips with a cochineal
   comfort, the way spring water laves the skin
   with its brisk plush touch. I will gather in
   my hours as the darkness climbs and spreads.
   It has become the ocean. Up to our heads
   we bob and drift, remembranceless,
   and for all we cling to spars of nothingness,
   names burn their starlight on dark irises.

   I feel the soul inside me, dear dieresis
   that thews my breath and flesh, that separates
   heart's thrusting muscle as it meditates
   from all the rough heart cherishes, I sense
   the supple disjunctions of the animal
   threshed in the indiscernible
   meshes of the element and, terrified,
   crow with the cock and bark with the farmer's dog,
   wriggle awake, crawl from the salt bog
   of sleep unsatisfied:

   on my lips and on my eyelids as the new
   sun shoulders the clouds aside,
   a darkness sits, intangible as dew.